


A Trashcan Fire in a Prison Cell

by secterinspecter



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, Post-Canon, Sharing a Body, Telepathy, Training Montages, compliant through gtn epilogue, gideon is alive but the angst Doesn't Stop, lots of discussion of death, no spoilers for htn act 1, two kids in a trenchcoat pretend to be a lyctor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:07:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23458312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/secterinspecter/pseuds/secterinspecter
Summary: Harrowhark Nonagesimus's ascension to Lyctor lasts for all of a week, because Gideon Nav cannot die. She's back, alive inside of Harrow with no body to speak of, and the entire power of Lyctorhood comes from the cavalier being stuck in the eternal moment of death. So that's kind of a bust.Harrowhark the First will not let God find out about this. This is not the first secret that she has kept, though hiding two deaths is a lot easier than hiding one life, especially when that life will not shut up. Or when there is nothing she'd rather do than talk to that life for the rest of eternity.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 12
Kudos: 76





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> it's been a month since i finished reading gideon the ninth and i'm still not ok
> 
> title from "Old College Try" by the mountain goats

It was not for a lack of trying that Harrowhark Nonagesimus could not conceive of a universe without Gideon Nav. Her parents had been the ones to introduce her to the experiments. After their deaths, she and Crux had carried on, letting the experiments become yet another despicable corpse shambling through the halls of the Ninth in the wake of her parents’ death.

Eighty-six experiments. Harrow counted them with the same fervor as Gideon counted her eighty-six escape attempts. It was easiest to disguise the experiments as punishments. Harrow half-suspected that if Gideon knew the truth growing up, she would have died then and there as a massive fuck-you to the whole endeavour. Harrow of all people knew that a will to live was a tenuous thing.

By the eighty-seventh attempt, Harrow was convinced that nothing in this universe could kill Gideon. She half-heartedly had Crux turn off the heating to Gideon’s cell once or twice. Gideon lived. This was wholly unsurprising: they’d already ran through the whole gamut of temperature trials when Harrow was eight years old.

After the siphoning trial, Harrow had to admit that there was nothing she wanted less than a world without Gideon. She swore to herself to end the experiments. She told Gideon some of the truth. She tried not to look back.

Now here, on the Emperor’s ship, Harrow was forced to admit that Gideon was dead. She’d finally found the one thing that could kill her.

* * *

In the week after her ascension, Harrowhark Nonagesiums wilted back into the greatest necromancer of her generation.

The loss of power was not what galled her, nor even the jibes of Ianthe as she slipped in pools of her own blood sweat while trying to heft an increasingly unfamiliar rapier. Although, the latter was what was had led her to her current position curled under heaps of blankets on the bed in her quarters. Unlike anything she’d ever experienced, these blankets did not smell of mold and decay. She found herself longing desperately for familiarity and everything that familiarity entailed.

More than anything, Harrow wished she was responsible for this change that she indisputably deserved. If she’d reversed her own Lyctorhood, she’d be bravely delivering her own justice unto herself. She’d be giving up everything she ever thought she wanted, for the smallest chance of seeing Gideon again, of being someone halfway worthy of Gideon and Gideon’s sacrifice.

Instead everything was being stripped from her, and all she could do was watch.

The next thing Harrow noticed was laughter, not unkind, coming from the general direction of the back of her head. Familiar laughter, and then an even more familiar voice.

“Well, shit.” A pause, more laughter, and then: “Fuck, Nonagesimus, how’d I ever keep a vow of silence? One comment about stripping and watching and I’m laid helpless before you.”

“Nav?” Harrow said, an instinctive, stupid, reaction.

“I’m guessing you wouldn’t believe I’m just one of your weird fantasies? Because I’m really regretting that last bit.”

In truth, jab about weird fantasies aside, Harrow was more than willing to believe that she’d finally lost it. It was only a matter of time. Days of shouting, screaming, pleading with her own mind to show her the smallest trace of Gideon had left her numb to the boundaries of her self. Now the dire consequences were showing.

At the same time, though, a challenge had been issued. This apparition wanted to be dismissed, and so Harrow could allow nothing of the sort.

“I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction,” Harrow said.

“Well, good news for you then, my benighted Lyctoress! I, Gideon Nav, will be spending the rest of eternity inside your head, pointing out every accidental sex joke your woefully ignorant nun brain could never comprehend!“ The voice - Gideon - no, the voice - paused. Harrow could practically hear the diseased clanking of gears she’d always imagined when she saw Gideon trying to think. “Probably a good thing I’m not actually dead, because I’d make the most useless revenant ever to grace this galaxy.”

That stopped Harrow in her tracks.

“You’re not dead?” she asked.

“I was, for a while,” the voice said. “I think. I remember all this water, like a pool but longer. It was really weird and I wished you were there, which was fucking stupid, because I did all of this to keep you alive. But then I started seeing you every now and then, and I was like, okay, afterlife babes, sure, why not. But then I started seeing Ianthe too, so I noped out of that idea. I think that’s when I realized something was up.”

“A pool but long,” Harrow repeated, incredulous. “The River that bounds the thanergetic spaces of life and death, a theological question that has tormented generations of our devout, something that most spirits scream rather than suffer to describe, and the best you can come up with is ‘long pool.’”

“We both know I never went to services,” the voice said. “Anyway, turns out I was seeing through your eyes. You’re right, by the way, it’s not the same thing as reading your thoughts. Took me ages to figure out how to really do that, even once I stopped seeing the river at all.”

“Griddle, whatever you think it is that you’re doing, you’re certainly not reading my thoughts,” Harrow said. “For one thing, you don’t know how to read.”

Gideon’s laugh sounded again from somewhere far-off, and Harrow recoiled, unsure whether to stop up the tears welling from her eyes or push down the hint of a smile that was starting to turn the corners of her mouth. She won her battle with the smile, but the tears came all the more readily for it.

She’d imagined Gideon every damn second since ascension. Conversations, jokes, secrets, betrayals. Conversations about the conversations, Gideon making fun of her for the imagining and encouraging her to get on with it. In her weaker moments, Gideon waxing necromantic about how she’d managed to survive, expounding glorious theorem after theorem that fixed everything, until Harrow all but screamed in frustration because her cavalier would never talk like that, and she knew that, and hadn’t she spent her entire life knowing Gideon, and why couldn’t she get even this right?

Never once, until now, had it made her feel better. She’d finally snapped, and this was her punishment? A delusion so profound that it became happiness?

Harrow felt like she could talk to this shade forever, lose herself in it until she was addled and powerless and of no use to anyone. With the last vestiges of her strength, she began to push it away.

“Prove to me,” she said, “that you are Gideon. Tell me something only she would know.”

“C’mon, Harrow, I don’t know things!” the voice protested. “If I had my two-hander, maybe, but I don’t know how to control your body and it looks like you’re busy hiding under a blanket anyway.”

“The Emperor has eyes everywhere,” Harrow said. She glared at nowhere in particular, since her own eyes couldn't reach the inside of her skull where the voice was lurking.

“Fine, no swords, certainly wouldn’t want to interrupt blanket hiding time now that I know it’s tactics. Stuff nobody else would know, huh? Do you remember, back in the pool, when we both took off-”

“I was there, you absolute dumbass,” Harrow said, heat rising to her cheeks as she quickly headed off that line of discussion. “Remember who you’re trying to convince.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Try again,” Harrow said, as imperiously as she could muster.

“Okay, well, you definitely don’t know the plot of _Wanton Warriors of the Third_. Or _Boobs and Broadswords_. You’ve had a rough week, so I’ll even let you pick.”

Harrow studiously examined the interior of the blankets, her blush deepening.

“Harrow?”

She kept quiet.

“C’mon, I just said ‘boobs.’ Hold it together a little.”

Harrow took a deep breath, confident at last that Gideon could not read her thoughts, and prepared herself to salvage the situation.

“That won’t work,” she said, hoping they could leave it at that. When the voice didn’t respond, she sighed. “I already know what’s in _Wanton Warriors of the Third_ , and, Emperor help me, _Boobs and Broadswords_.”

“Wow.” Then, again, in a tone of abject wonder, “Wow.”

“It may surprise you to know that I do not wish to talk about this,” Harrow said, her entire face burning. She half-expected the straggling tears leaking out of her eyes to sizzle up in smoke.

“Look, there’s nothing I can say to make you believe it’s me. You have enough suspicion and self-loathing in that tiny body to keep an entire house under lockdown for years.”

“Do you know why I won’t believe you?” Harrow asked, serious all of a sudden, all thoughts of boobs and banter and laughter forgotten. “You said you’d see me on the flipside, right before... Before you went away. You can’t be back. Even you knew that.“

“What?” The voice sounded genuinely uncertain. “Harrow, I never said anything like that. The last thing I told you was that I was about to do the cruellest thing anyone had ever done to you, and hey, me being stuck in your head for the rest of eternity probably qualifies.”

Harrow ran back through what she’d always assumed was her final conversation with Gideon. A conversation with a self-admitted hallucination. Which the real Gideon wouldn’t remember. Shit.

“Idea time,” Gideon said, obliviously, not knowing what she’d just set off in Harrow. “Maybe you should do some necromancy about it.”

“Do… some necromancy about it,” Harrow repeated.

“Yeah. Look into my soul or whatever it is you do.”

It was a profoundly obvious suggestion. The thanergy flow of a dying soul and of a living soul were fundamentally different. There was just one problem.

“I can’t,” she admitted. “I can’t bear it, Gideon. If I don’t see you, if I just see myself… myself and the others… it’s over. You’d be gone. I’d have let your soul slip away from me at last, after a lifetime of holding you close because I could not bear even a day without you. My Lyctor powers are gone and that means one of two things. I cannot risk the second. I would rather live an eternity in the hope of you.”

“Harrow, listen,” Gideon said. “I believe in you. You’re the best necromancer I’ve ever seen. I’m sure that you - we - were the best damn Lyctor in this galaxy, even if I wasn’t there to see it. I trusted you with my life then, and I’m trusting you again with my life now. I know I’m alive right now, I can feel it, and even if I couldn’t feel it, I would still know it, because you’re too good of a necromancer to accidentally drop-kick my immortal soul off the side of a spaceship.”

“Nobody should trust me with their life,” Harrow said, a cursed existence’s worth of bitterness behind her spat words.

“It’s a little late for that,” Gideon said. “How many times do I have to say it? One flesh, one end.”

“I don’t want an end,” Harrow choked out. “I never did.”

“You won’t get one. Harrow, even if I’m the fakest-ass faker to ever fake, I’m not leaving you. One way or another, I’m part of you now. Let’s just settle this. Take my hand.”

“You don’t have hands,” Harrow protested, but she felt a prickling of warmth in her fingers, the same way she’d emptily imagined Gideon’s voice in the preceding days. She knew it wasn’t Gideon’s hand in hers, but acting otherwise was the only thing that let her steel herself for what lay ahead, so she for once did not deny herself this small solace.

The necromancy itself was achingly simple. She scarcely closed her eyes before it gleamed before her, blinding even where it sat immersed in the inky morass of two hundred dead children’s burned out husks. Gideon’s soul, as vital and beautiful as ever.

“Gideon,” Harrow said, flecks of soul-light shifting and gleaming with tears as she blinked her eyes over and over again. “You’re alive.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Boobs and Broadswords" is not my invention. texting a friend "i need two fictional titty mags" is shockingly effective


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the first act of harrow the ninth was released today. i'm not planning on reading it, at least not for a while, so there won't be any spoilers in this story. there's a lot of theorizing, especially in future chapters, but it's all based on gideon the ninth and (to a lesser extent) the harrow the ninth prologue. if i get anything right, i'll be very lucky and very surprised

Harrow stalked through the halls of the Mithraeum, feeling the weight of profound dread settle in the back of her mind next to Gideon Nav’s inexplicable but not unwelcome presence. The Emperor had given her all of an hour with her cavalier before the summons.

The ground before Harrow was littered with books, their covers shining dully under the Mithraeum’s harsh lights. Where Harrow stood, there were only a few volumes, but as she looked towards the end of the hallway, she could see tall columns of stacked books, many of them tipped over into an irregular tide that covered great swaths of the floor.

“Nav, we’re approaching the Emperor’s quarters,” Harrow said. “This is where I will once again ask a vow of silence of you, or, failing that, that you refrain from calling our Undying Lord an incurable dorkface, no matter what impulses may take hold of you.”

“So you’re saying that the Undying Lord is an incurable dorkface,” said Gideon. “Noted.”

“That will be for you to determine. Quietly.”

Harrow picked her way across the hallway, robe bundled in her hands so it wouldn’t catch in the mess at her feet. She was keenly aware of Gideon watching her. Under normal circumstances, there would be two possibilities if she tripped and fell: Gideon would either take Harrow’s hand and help her across or stand there and laugh. One of those was no longer a possibility. Harrow gripped her robe more tightly, letting the thick fabric tangle in her fingers.

“Harrowhark the First, is that you?” the Emperor called, voice echoing out of an open doorway.

“Yes, My Lord,” Harrow said, hastening her passage. It would not do for the Emperor to know that his Hand could currently be outmatched by a cluttered hallway. “I was merely pausing to admire your collection.”

“Like hell you were,” Gideon said.

“To clarify,” Harrow said internally, “Your vow of silence starts now, where now is defined as—”

“Harrow, I know what now means.”

Harrow waited what felt like several seconds for Gideon’s inevitable realization. 

“Shit.”

Not bothering to reply, putting her trust into Gideon Nav because that was all she could ever do, Harrowhark the First swept through the open doorway into God’s private sanctum.

God put down his cup of tea, staring expectantly at her from a worn-out armchair, which appeared to be the epicenter of the tide of books spilling into the hallway. The few parts of the room not covered by books were dotted with lamps, hanging from the walls and ceilings at a dizzying array of angles, each shining with a slightly different color, from the dull yellow that illuminated the Ninth House to the harsh utilitarian blue that covered the rest of the Mithraeum. Under these lights, the glossy black of the Emperor’s eyes warped and winked with new colors whenever he shifted his gaze even slightly, until Harrow felt all but trapped in his prismatic glory.

“My Lord,” Harrow said, “I have heeded your summons. I am here in your service, whatever you may require of me."

“I called you to my quarters to talk,” the Emperor said. “That is all. Take a seat.”

Harrow eased herself into a tottering chair made of polished black wood. Worn scratches on the chair’s arms suggested that someone, or several someones, had repeatedly clenched sharp fingernails into the surface. Sitting there and contemplating the uncomfortable conversation ahead, Harrow couldn’t fault them for it.

“I am your fingers and gestures,” Harrow said, “and your voice.”

“No, Harrowhark, no,” the Emperor said, his chuckle more cheery than it had any right to be. “We’re here to talk about you.”

“Me, My Lord?”

“It was a week ago that you pledged yourself in service to me,” the Emperor said. “Miniscule in the face of a myriad, but in these circumstances not entirely insignificant. We cannot leave your reintegration and recovery at the mercy of time.”

“I am at nobody’s mercy,” Harrow said.

“That may be,” the Emperor said charitably. “Regardless, I have heard reports from your instructors. They have concerns.”

A wave of nausea, not unlike that which she experienced when she picked up the rapier in the training room, threatened to make its presence felt. Harrow found the grooves in the chair’s arm again, and forgetting dignity, subtly dug her nails in. Images of Ianthe’s gloating face danced in her mind. Of course it would have reached the Emperor.

“They say that your cavalier is lately nowhere to be seen, whether in your fighting or, more worryingly, in your general affect,” the Emperor continued. “Knowledge of combat will come in time, once the union is complete. But all signs point to you deliberately suppressing your cavalier, or, worse, experimenting. 

“Buddy, you have no idea,” Gideon muttered. Harrow fought to ignore this, inwardly cursing her cavalier’s terrible timing and making sure Gideon could hear it.

“Please forgive me,” Harrow said out loud. And then, to Gideon, “Not you, him.” 

“My goal was never to remove my cavalier,” Harrow continued. “I desire to act in a manner befitting a lyctor, as imparted to me from a lifetime of service to the Ninth House. If my instructors cannot find the traces of Gideon Nav within me, it speaks to nothing of my own experience. The inscrutability of the Ninth House faithful has frequently been remarked upon. Yet I carry her with me always.”

The Emperor was staring at Harrow, his chin resting in his hand. Unwittingly, Harrow’s hand traveled up her cheek, following the Emperor’s gaze. She half-expected to discover that she was crying again, but when her eyelid was manifestly dry, she found her way to a worse conclusion.

“So you do,” the Emperor said at last. “It would perhaps be terribly glib to say that I can see it in your eyes.”

“Nice one,” said Gideon, who apparently thought that cliches were automatically funny.

The Emperor, thankfully, could still not hear her. Yet, with her fingers resting below her eyelid, Harrow could feel the faintest spasm as Gideon spoke, along with a pulse of heat radiating outwards as the switch took place. She did not need a mirror to know what she would see. Sometimes it felt like she’d imagined those eyes every accursed second of her life.

“Still, out of an abundance of caution, I will speak to Calliope the First,” the Emperor said. “Her particular specialty is in spirit talking, and I have no doubt that she will help to connect with your inner cavalier.”

“Oh,  _ balls _ no,” Harrow’s inner cavalier said, inwardly. Harrow’s personal choice of words would have been “profoundly unacceptable,” but she bit back the urge to speak her mind. Now was the time for strategy and sacrifice.

“Oh,  _ balls _ no,” Harrow said, attempting to mimick Gideon’s exact cadence, down to the drawl on ‘balls.’ The actual effect on anyone listening, she judged, was halfway between watching someone regurgitate a live rat and being forced to attend one of Ortus’s poetry readings. At least based on the way Gideon was snickering.

“A valiant attempt,” the Emperor said. Was he smiling now? “My order stands.”

“Will that be all, My Lord?” Harrow asked, eager to leave before she could make the situation any worse.

“One more thing, Harrowhark,” the Emperor said, reaching below the side of the armchair and retrieving a plain wooden box slightly larger than Harrow’s hand. Harrow stood, and, immediately determining that her legs were inclined to be distrustful, took a few short steps to kneel before her God. 

The wooden box was much lighter than Harrow would have anticipated. The lid opened easily with a creaking of hinges.

“Harrow, why does the Necrolord Prime have my sunglasses?”

It was an eminently reasonable question. Images flashed in Harrow’s mind. Gideon’s corpse, lying on the ground of the First House, before a blue and shining sky. Gideon’s eyes, reopened in death through Harrow’s desperation to selfishly gaze at their amber hues, as if she hadn’t eaten Gideon’s entire life already. A pair of liberated aviator sunglasses clutched in Harrow’s hand until tiny cracks crunched their way into the glass. Emptiness.

Wordlessly, Harrow shoved the sunglasses into the pocket of her robes. She considered thanking the Emperor genuinely. She considered slipping back into the simpering mask of the Reverend Daughter. She didn’t trust herself to speak without choking, and settled for a single nod before staggering out of the room.

“Use them well,” God demanded.

* * *

Ianthe was leaning pallidly against the wall, only a single bend of corridor away from the hallway that housed the Emperor’s sanctum. Today, Harrow noted, she wore her own eyes. This did not make her any more of a welcome sight.

“I know where you just were, you little coward,” Ianthe said.

“What a coincidence,” Harrow said, attempting to continue along the hallway. “So do I.”

Ianthe shrugged, then extended an arm across the narrow hallway. Gold-plated fingers splayed on the opposite wall. It would have blocked Harrow’s path, except that it was several inches above Harrow’s head. Gideon groaned.

“Naberius must be having the time of his life, finally not a world-class shrimpfest,” Gideon said. 

“Nevertheless, I don’t envy him,” Harrow said, halting as she decided not to risk the potential injury to dignity and body that would arise from walking under that arm.

“I am not enough of a fool to ignore the direct summons of the Lord Undying,” Harrow said to Ianthe. 

“There was no direct summons,” Ianthe said. “You squealed. If the Emperor has not yet summoned me, the first Lyctor to ascend in ten thousand years, he has certainly not summoned you.”

“So he hasn’t summoned you,” Harrow said. The Emperor was rightly not concerned with Ianthe Tridentarius, but he was apparently not concerned  _ for  _ Ianthe Tridentarius either, and that stung. “That must be terribly lonely for you, having nobody knocking on your door to sing your praises for the new levels of perversity that you’ve invented. You must be starting to finally wonder if any of this was actually worth it.”

Ianthe leaned her head back on the wall a touch too fast. The metal of the bulkhead clunked dully. The other Lyctor’s eyes began to roll and twist as she gritted her teeth.

“Not  _ now, _ Babs,” Ianthe cooed. “You can’t possibly want to fight her. There’s nothing there for you. She can’t even hold a sword.”

Harrow, as a roundabout way of not proving Ianthe right, refused to touch the rapier dangling at her side. Ianthe continued to struggle. One eye had turned entirely blue.

“Oh, I see,” Ianthe said. “You want to complain again. Really, Babs? Haven’t you done enough of that?”

“If Naberius Tern shows up, I’m kicking his ass,” Gideon said.

“Nav, you have nothing with which to kick.”

“And you said I didn’t have an audience,” Ianthe remarked, unaware of the conversation going on around her. She was panting slightly. “Every time he struggles, I can feel my theorems getting stronger. He expends his entire life force trying to get away and yet it comes straight back to me. But you wouldn’t know what that’s like, would you?”

Harrow, of all people, absolutely did. It just had nothing to do with Lyctorhood. She didn’t trust herself to speak and instead sunk into the pit of despair and guilt that she’d spent the past week digging.

“Don’t think I haven’t noticed that your cavalier is nowhere to be seen. Did you let her escape? Don’t you realize that escape would be nothing other than certain death? Babs doesn’t understand that, of course, but I would have expected you to know better.”

“Hey, O Bitch of Mega-Hubris!” Gideon yelled. “I’m right here!”

Unlike Ianthe, she didn’t try to fight the shift in her eyes. It felt as natural as following the urge to blink. Fear melted away and was replaced by determined certainty. She wasn’t facing Ianthe alone.

“Cute party trick,” Ianthe said. “Did I finally get a reaction? I have to say, I’m looking forward to not being the only one around here betrayed by eyes. It’s been dreadfully dull and dreadfully embarrassing all in one. Now I’ll get to watch you light up like a signal flare every time you and your cavalier have a domestic disagreement, and you won’t have any recourse when you think to criticize me of the same.”

“Not quite,” Harrow said, reaching into her pocket. She’d proved that Gideon was there, and now it was time for the second phase.

Harrow flipped the aviator sunglasses open and jammed them on her nose. Years of practice applying makeup in the dark found an unorthodox use as the shades snapped perfectly in place. Smirking, she regarded Ianthe through the dark lenses, eyes hidden, settling into the smug happiness of a secret well-kept. 

“I am Harrowhark the First. I am the perfect union of the Ninth House’s finest. And that is all you will ever know of me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next time: local edgy teenager wears sunglasses during therapy appointment, refuses to accept criticism


End file.
